Monaghan County Council works with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders and operational units across the region to deliver critical local government information, skills and facilities to the local population. As a local government authority covering an area of more than one thousand square kilometers and overseeing hundreds of frontline workers, its biggest challenge was an outdated, unengaging and segmented digital environment. Employees were not using the intranet as a collaboration or information-sharing platform and resources, information and news were siloed across different departments such as IT, finance, housing, roads, environmental services, water, fire and building control, planning and economic development, cultural services, heritage and library services, motor tax and more.

Monaghan County Council were using SharePoint 2007, an old legacy intranet system operating from servers on site. The preferred option was to upgrade to SharePoint Online but there were no skills inhouse to develop or design an intranet portal, and neither was their capacity to maintain it into the future, and this is when LiveTiles became the favored solution.

Business critical information was often siloed under the remit of one specific department. Business processes were not well aligned or streamlined, and each department operated more independently than the IT department would have liked. This resulted, inter alia, in a heavy administrative burden for the IT department which was forced to spend valuable time maintaining and updating information because not only did users not have editorial permissions for the legacy system, but it was also too complex and required technical skills even for basic information updates.

www.livetiles.nyc

The Customer

Profile: Local Government Authority with 430 employees spread across more than 20 locations, serving a population in excess of 60’000 people.

Location:

Industry:

Website:

Solution Provided:

The Challenge: Kickstarting Digital Transformation

Customer Story Monaghan County Council,

Ireland

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www.livetiles.nyc

All aboard: Starting the Transformation Journey.Monaghan County Council’s IT team led the transformation project and started by defining the needs. This included the importance of a searchable document repository, a portal to access all internal systems, the ability and ease of use to empower end users to update documents and post social announcements which would greatly alleviate an unnecessary burden of rudimentary tasks for the IT department.

Infrastructure and security were to the fore so that Monaghan County Council could ensure that the platform remained stable regardless of any network threats. It was acknowledged early on that it was essential for the new platform to deliver an engaging user experience. To help achieve this the IT team carried out an internal study on engagement and adoption with a pilot group of diverse users including the CEO. Feedback was gathered which directly helped shape the main UX requirements as well as helping to create a sense of ownership and excitement. Ultimately, these preparatory steps led to a very high and swift adoption from end users.

In order to transform the situation, it was critical to create an online digital portal to connect disparate departments and to provide them with access to essential and relevant content that would empower employees to function effectively in their work. We could not have a static intranet. The big challenge was how were we going to design a new intranet and maintain it in a cost-effective manner. We were facing an expensive route of external consultants with ongoing commitment to them for maintenance and upgrade or a very bland out-of-the box SharePoint experience which would never engage staff. In a working environment where the main source of communication and collaboration was over email, an unengaging front-end aesthetic would make for poor adoption and low usage of the intranet organization wide.

Carmel O’Hare, Head of IT, Monaghan County Council.

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ProCloud kicked off the process to design, create and implement the first iteration of the new, people-centered intranet. The first step was to organize a video conference for the client and demo relevant use cases as experienced by existing LiveTiles customers. After this a visit to the LiveTiles team in Sligo was organized where the innovation team, together with Monaghan County Council, built out the first template in a hands-on design-thinking workshop. This was a very practical and outcome-oriented session where the customer listed their key challenges and requirements and the team quickly developed and provided the plug and play solutions.

How the discovery session worked: Firstly, the team looked at the most frequently accessed systems and put them front and foremost on the portal design. This included features such as expenses, clocking in, room booking, phone directories, and checking which colleagues were registered as clocked in (a frequently used feature that drives collaboration).

Monaghan County Council were not in a position where they could experience any downtime and it was business-critical to have a fully streamlined switchover with two systems (the old and the new) running in parallel.

“ When you work in local government you cannot have a system or service unavailable. LiveTiles enabled us to build a new portal that ran alongside the legacy system and, after the pilot phase with selected users, the speed of deployment was basically overnight. Users went home on a Tuesday evening and came in on a Wednesday morning to a completely new intranet experience. An instant switchover.”

Carmel O’ Hare, Head of IT.

Time to Deploy: Digital Transformation in Action

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Working together with ProCloud Ireland, Monaghan County Council Identified the LiveTiles intelligent intranet platform as the perfect solution to address the key challenges faced by the local authority.

ProCloud engaged in a discovery session with the customer and the LiveTiles customer success team to map out how the new portal would look and feel. ProCloud iterated on the design as well as upskilling and training the Monaghan County Council team in LiveTiles best practice. This approach allowed the customer to become masters of their own environment and empowered the IT department specifically to devolve ownership and design of pages to different departments within the organization.

ProCloud positioned LiveTiles as the intelligent intranet solution for Monaghan County Council because of its renowned quick deployment times and the ease-of-use around the no-code drag and drop technology that allows non-technical users to build engaging experiences.

The speed of deployment was basically overnight. Users went home on a Tuesday evening and came in on a Wednesday morning to a completely new intranet experience. Carmel O’Hare, Head of IT, Monaghan County Council.

ProCloud found the flexibility and scalability of LiveTiles great to work with as the customer was under pressing time constraints to deliver an intranet environment for their management and staff and this meant they were now able to roll out a digital workplace platform in a significantly shorter time than it would have taken with custom deployment.

Niall O’Donohoe, Managing Director, ProCloud (LiveTiles local deployment partner).

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Onward to an Exciting Future: The Benefits of Digital Transformation.

Following the swift deployment and the careful preparation that involved users and carefully mapped requirements, Monaghan County Council has deployed a totally transformed intranet experience to its community of employees and has seen an immediate uptick in engagement where users visit the portal as the go-to hub for information, news and collaboration.

Some of the key benefits include:

• smoother onboarding for new and moving staff which is a business-critical requirement in a pubic sector agency which can be characterized by a high transition of staff across departments and locations.

• a much-needed consolidation of documentation from multiple drives and locations enabling more consistent information sharing and achieving a ‘single source of truth’

• Significant decrease in email traffic with the dual benefit of freeing up employees for more productive and collaborative projects as well as freeing up servers and infrastructure for higher-status activity. “Emails have been cut down – from an IT point of view it is not just an email going out to you it is all the space it is taking up, they need to be backed up and disaster recovery in place for every email, and archived as well, so for a single global announcement that’s 430 copies on your mail, archive, and recovery – reduction in this overhead is significant.”

A major strategic benefit is that Monaghan County Council is now future-proofed for any challenges that may arise in the fast-paced world of technology development. As LiveTiles is a platform approach it brings great flexibility and scalability depending on where the customer is on their digital transformation journey, adapting to challenges and budgets as required.

We wanted to reduce the email load as

much as possible and to position the new intranet as much as

possible for information sharing and posting

global announcements. Therefore, the

experience had to be attractive for users,

prompting them to see the value in having the intranet as the central

hub for information and collaboration.

Future Proofing Your Business

LiveTiles is a company that invests heavily in developing new AI-powered solutions and pushing the boundaries of intelligent workplace solutions and these benefits and opportunities will continue to be passed on to customers and users.

“Right now, we are testing the LiveTiles automated people directories and organizational charts which can be a real game changer for us. We are also unlocking the power of the real-time analytics which provides us with instant guidance on what is working (or not) on the portal and steers us to a quick fix”. Carmel O’Hare, Head of IT.

1 Unloading a heavy administrative burden from a busy IT team and freeing them up to concentrate on higher-ticket items.

2 Engaging employees with a digital experience they love which at once drives down email and ramps up collaboration.

3 Future proofing a dynamic local government agency for the challenges ahead and positioning them to quickly seize and integrate the opportunities that will be regularly rolling off the LiveTiles Road Map.

Just three of the benefits gained by Monaghan County Council, a Local Government Authority in Ireland, and a valued LiveTiles customer. If you would like to learn more about successful use cases from LiveTiles customers in the Public Sector or other verticals such as Retail, Manufacturing, Finance, Insurance or Sport and Media, to name just a few, please get in touch and we would be delighted to hear about your business challenges and aspirations.

Carmel O’Hare, Head of IT, Monaghan County Council.

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